Monday, September 22, 2008

County's counterattack

The group of Bronx politicians gunning for control of the county Democratic Party lost a battle today.They had planned to pre-empt a county party committee meeting, to be held Sunday, Sept. 28, with one of their own design, tonight, at 7 p.m. Lawyers for county Democratic Party leader Jose Rivera brought a suit last week to stop the meeting. Today, a state Supreme Court judge ruled in their favor, according to spokesmen from both sides of the party split.Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz, who, with his colleagues Carl Heastie, Aurelia Greene and Ruben Diaz Jr., is a leader of this uprising, said the judge agreed with his side in all salient points but one — the venue chosen for tonight's meeting, the Dreiser Loop Community Center in Co-op City, doesn't have the capacity to accommodate all 1,790 1,834 members of the county committee. It can hold only 1,300 people, Mr. Dinowitz said, though he points out that these meetings very rarely have 100 percent attendance."We’re going to be meeting and determining how to react to this, whether we should go to Co-op City anyway and have a giant rally, or just go on Sunday, [because] we’ll beat ‘em on Sunday," Mr. Dinowitz told me just now.The county regulars are holding a press conference announcing the decision at 3:30 p.m., a county spokesman said.